How to buy a domain name: purchase a domain, buy a web domain, and compare domain buying sites

Search the exact string first, because the answer changes everything that follows. A registry lookup returns one of four states: unregistered, registered and publicly listed for sale, registered and quietly held with no listing, or expiring and heading for auction. Do not judge availability by typing the name into a browser. Plenty of registered names sit parked with nothing on them, and plenty of names that load a real page are quietly for sale. Only a live lookup tells you the truth, so check whether the name is available before you plan around it.

If the answer is unregistered, the rest is a checkout. You register it with an ICANN accredited registrar, pick a term, pay, and it is in your account within minutes. Take the two year term if the registrar prices it sensibly, because it removes a renewal you will otherwise forget. The one thing worth reading closely on that screen is the renewal price rather than the first year price, since the first year is frequently discounted and the renewal is what you actually live with.

If the answer is anything else, you are buying from a person rather than from a registry, and the shape changes. A public buy it now price is a same day transaction. A make an offer listing is a negotiation of a few days. No listing at all means a cold approach with no reply rate worth relying on. An expiring name means a bid, a deadline you do not control, and competition from people who watch drop lists for a living.

For an unregistered name in a mainstream extension, budget roughly $11 to $23 a year in the United States. The floor is set by the registry rather than by the shop: Verisign charges registrars $10.26 wholesale for .com, rising to $10.97 on November 1, 2026, and ICANN adds $0.20 per domain year on top. Everything above that is registrar margin, which is why the same name costs $11 at one shop and $22 at another, and it is worth knowing what a fresh registration actually costs before you judge any offer. It is worth taking a minute to compare registrars on renewal price, since that gap repeats every single year you hold the name.

A minority of unregistered names cost far more, and the reason surprises people. Some strings are priced as a premium name by the registry itself, which sets a higher wholesale rate for names it judges valuable. Those prices are not a first year promotion. They apply at every renewal for as long as you hold the name, so a $600 premium .co is a $600 annual commitment rather than a one time payment. Read the renewal figure on the checkout screen, not the headline.

Taken names are a different market with no price list. What somebody will accept depends on length, extension, whether it is a real dictionary word, and how many other people want it. Sedo, one of the larger aftermarket venues, reports a median sale price around $549, which is a more useful anchor than the six figure sales that get written up. Before you name a figure it pays to work out what to offer, because the first number spoken usually sets the ceiling for the rest of the conversation.

It depends on which of the three routes you are on, and most domain buying sites only serve one of them well. Registrars sell unregistered names and are optimized for that: fast checkout, good renewal pricing, no help at all once the name comes back taken. Marketplaces list names their owners have chosen to sell, which is a fraction of what is registered. Auction platforms handle expiring inventory on the registry timetable. Each is genuinely good at its own slice and blind to the other two.

The practical consequence is that people run the same name through three separate sites and three separate accounts before they get a complete answer, and often give up somewhere in the middle. That is the gap NameBest is built for, and it is narrower than it sounds: it settles the question the three sites disagree about. The exact string goes to the registry over RDAP, so you get one authoritative answer on whether anybody holds the name, and a value estimate on the ones nobody does, which is the number you carry into whichever of the three venues the name is actually sitting in.

Whichever route you end up on, judge the shop on three things rather than on the first year price. Renewal cost, because that is the recurring number. Whether transfers out are supported without friction, since you may want to move it to another registrar in a few years. And whether the registration lands in your own name, which matters more than anything else on this list and is quietly wrong more often than you would expect when an agency or a host buys the name on your behalf.

No, and any service implying otherwise is describing something that does not exist. Domains are licensed for a term, not sold freehold. You register the exclusive right to use a name for a period, most commonly one year, and you keep that right for as long as you keep renewing. Most generic extensions allow registration up to ten years at a time, which is the closest thing to permanence the system offers.

In practice this matters less than it sounds, because renewal is unconditional. No registry can decline your renewal because it changed its mind about you, and nobody can outbid you for a name you already hold. The only realistic way to lose one is to stop paying, or to let a card expire and miss the notices. That is a calendar problem rather than a legal one, and auto renew with a card that is actually current solves it.

The number that ambushes people is not the first year, it is what it costs to renew in year two. A dollar first year sitting next to a $22 renewal is an $89 five year purchase rather than a bargain. Set a ten year term on any name you are certain about, keep auto renew on, and make sure the notices go to an address you still read. ICANN requires your registrar to warn you roughly a month before expiry, roughly a week before, and within five days after, so the warnings exist even when the inbox is buried.

Start by working out whether it is for sale, because that decides your whole approach. A name with a public listing has an owner who has already decided to sell, and you are negotiating price rather than persuading somebody to part with something. A name with no listing means a cold approach to a person who was not planning to sell this week, which is slower and fails often. Either way, find out who holds it first, since the registrar record is public even where the registrant details are redacted.

For a cold approach, write a short direct message to a human. Say who you are, say you want to buy the name, and either name a number or ask for theirs while accepting that whoever speaks first usually loses ground. Do not open with a story about being a student or a nonprofit, because owners read that as an attempt to negotiate downward and it lowers reply rates rather than raising them. Expect silence more often than refusal. It also pays to check what the name was used for before, since a name with spam history or a prior trademark dispute is worth materially less than a clean one.

When you agree a price, the money goes through escrow, and this part is not optional. Escrow.com charges 2.6 percent with a $50 minimum on sales up to $5,000, dropping to 2.4 percent above that, which is cheap for removing the risk that one side takes the money or the name and disappears. After the transfer completes, a change of registrant triggers a 60 day lock during which the name cannot move again, so plan any registrar consolidation around it. If you want the longer walkthrough, our guide on how to buy it from the person who holds it covers the negotiation in detail.

Expiring names are the one route where patience beats budget, and they run on a fixed timetable rather than on the mood of a seller. When an owner stops renewing, the name enters a registrar grace period commonly lasting up to 45 days for .com, during which the original owner can still take it back at the ordinary price. Expiry auctions typically list around day 26 and close around day 43. If nobody bids, the name enters a 30 day redemption period that only the original owner can act in, then a 5 day pending delete, and it drops back to the public pool around day 75 to 80. Knowing exactly when you can buy an expired domain is the difference between winning it at auction and waiting months for a drop that somebody else already caught.

Which mechanism you use depends on where the name sits in that cycle. A name already in an expiry auction is simply a bid, and you can bid for it at auction like any other listing. A name heading past redemption toward deletion is caught rather than bought, so you place a backorder with a drop catching service and pay for an attempt rather than a result. Published fees run roughly $19 refundable at NameJet up to $69 to $99 at SnapNames, and catch rates on contested names sit somewhere in the 10 to 40 percent range depending on who else wants it.

One warning that saves real money. A lapsed name frequently reads as unregistered in a naive availability checker while it is still inside redemption, so people plan a launch around a name that the original owner can reclaim at any moment for a restore fee. A green tick is not enough on its own, because names running through the expiry cycle need the stage read explicitly. Google also added expired domain abuse to its spam policies in March 2024, though buying an expired name is not itself a violation. What it penalizes is repurposing an aged name purely to launder its old reputation onto unrelated content.

Yes, and it is completely ordinary. Registrars sell domains on their own and nothing obliges you to buy hosting at the same time or from the same company. A great many domains are held with no site behind them at all: defensive registrations around a brand, names bought as inventory, and names parked while somebody decides what to build. If you are unsure how the two fit together, the difference between a domain and hosting is worth ten minutes before you buy either one.

A domain on its own does nothing visible until you point it somewhere, because there is no server holding any files. What it can do without a host is more than most people expect. It can forward to any other address, so it can sit in front of a Shopify store or a booking page. It can carry email at your own name through a separate mail provider, typically $6 to $8 per user a month. And it can simply be held while you decide, which is the honest state of most freshly bought names.

Be careful with bundles that hand you a free first year domain with a hosting plan. There is nothing wrong with the offer itself, it is a customer acquisition cost the host recovers at renewal, but two checks are worth making before you accept. Confirm the registration is in your own name rather than the host account, because otherwise you have possession without ownership. And get the second year renewal price in writing, since that is where the discount is paid back.

Two extra steps apply that do not apply to a personal name, and skipping either one is expensive later. First, run the trademark search before you buy rather than after, in your actual category and jurisdiction. Registering a domain grants you no rights to the words in it, and a UDRP complaint or an ACPA claim can cost far more than the name did. Statutory damages under the ACPA run from $1,000 to $100,000 per domain, so this is not a theoretical risk for a name that clearly rides on a brand somebody else built.

Second, register it to the company rather than to whoever happened to have the card that day. The registrant organization field is what determines the legal holder under ICANN policy in force since August 21, 2025, and correcting it later counts as a change of ownership and triggers a 60 day transfer lock. Founders discover this during a funding round or an acquisition, which is the worst possible moment. Getting the field right at checkout costs nothing.

On the name itself, pick something a person can hear once and type correctly, then stop optimizing. Google has said repeatedly that the extension is not a ranking factor, so the .com extension is worth paying for because of what buyers assume rather than because of search. If the .com is gone, run through the wider list of extensions before you conclude the name is dead, since names ending in .ai are now normal for software, a .io name reads as technical, a .co name works for a company, and a .org name instead is right for anything membership shaped. Our longer piece on choosing a name for a business covers the brief itself.

Four things, and the first two take about five minutes each. Confirm the registrant email, because ICANN requires verification within 15 days and an unverified registration can be suspended, which is the usual cause of a new domain going dark a fortnight after purchase. Then turn on auto renew and check the card on file is one that has not expired, since the single most common way to lose a name is a silent billing failure. Check that the account holding it belongs to you rather than to a designer or an agency, because getting your own domain name back afterwards is far more work than getting the field right now.

Third, point it somewhere even if you have nothing to publish. Set the nameservers your host or site builder gives you, or set a forward, or leave it parked deliberately. Propagation is usually a few hours and occasionally up to 48. Fourth, decide whether you want the defensive registrations now or never, because the answer is usually never. The common mistakes are buying the address half of a website and assuming a site comes with it, and buying eleven extensions of a name that nobody is competing for.

One thing not to do in a hurry. If you bought the name from another person, you cannot move it to another registrar for 60 days after the change of registrant, so consolidating your portfolio has to wait. And if the search that started all this came back with nothing you liked, let a generator propose alternatives against a live availability check rather than brainstorming names that turn out to have been registered in 2011. Getting a definite answer instead of a maybe is the whole point: it turns a dead end into a shortlist.